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Two of the major bottlenecks that have always hindered the development of mobile devices have been battery life and storage space. While there is no new joy on the battery front, it looks like a lack of mobile storage will soon be a thing of the past.

The SD Association has announced at CES that they have released a new set of specifications called SDXC (eXtended Capacity) which will be able to support capacities up to 2TB with read/write speeds up to104MB per second. TWO TERABYTES ON AN SD CARD. That is two million megabytes on a piece of plastic approximately the size of two thumbnails.

The press release puts it another way, a bit more conservatively:

SDXC allows users to enjoy more from their mobile phones. Larger capacity and faster transfer speeds allow for expanded entertainment and data storage. A 2TB SDXC memory card can store 100 HD movies, 60 hours of HD recording or 17,000 fine-grade photos.

If that isn’t enough, the press release says that SDIO and SDHC cards will also benefit from the faster write speeds.

While this is only a specification at this moment, and not an actual product, we shouldn’t have too long to wait for the cards to begin appearing. What may take longer are devices that can handle the increased sizes. Also, remember that it will take some time for 2T cards to be released since such things usually go incrementally. The SDHC standard has been around for a little while and can support cards up to 32GB, but we are only now seeing the first 32GB cards and 16GB cards are finally becoming more common and less expensive.

Still, that kind of storage size in an SD card will completely change the game not just for handheld devices but notebooks and netbooks as well. In fact those devices may be able to do away with HDs or SSDs entirely.

(Source: Gizmodo)

Zealot (446 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).